Raising A GM EV1 From The Dead

December 4, 2025 by No comments

Probably the biggest story in the world of old cars over the past couple of weeks has been the surfacing of a GM EV1 electric car for sale from an auto salvage yard. This was the famous electric car produced in small numbers by the automaker in the 1990s, then only made available for lease before being recalled. The vast majority were controversially crushed with a few units being donated to museums and universities in a non-functional state.

Finding an old car isn’t really a Hackaday story in itself, but now it’s landed in [The Questionable Garage]. It’s being subjected to a teardown as a prelude to its restoration, offering a unique opportunity to look at the state of the art in 1990s electric automotive technology.

The special thing about this car is that by a murky chain of events it ended up as an abandoned vehicle. GM’s legal net covers the rest of the surviving cars, but buying this car as an abandoned vehicle gives the owner legal title over it and frees him from their restrictions. The video is long, but well worth a watch as we see pieces of automotive tech never before shown in public. As we understand it the intention is to bring it to life using parts from GM’s contemporary S10 electric pickup truck — itself a rare vehicle — so we learn quite a bit about those machines too.

Along the way they find an EV1 charger hiding among a stock of pickup chargers, take us through the vehicle electronics, and find some galvanic corrosion in the car’s structure due to water ingress. The windscreen has a huge hole, which they cover with a plastic wrap in order to 3D scan so they can create a replacement.

This car will undoubtedly become a star of the automotive show circuit due to its unique status, so there will be plenty of chances to look at it from the outside in future. Seeing it this close up in parts though is as unique an opportunity as the car itself. We’ve certainly seen far more crusty conventional cars restored to the road, but without the challenge of zero parts availability and no donor cars. Keep an eye out as they bring it closer to the road.

Continue reading “Raising A GM EV1 From The Dead” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pretty Protoypes

December 4, 2025 by No comments

Some like it flat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What you are looking at is the first prototype of Atlas by [AsicResistor], which is still a work in progress. [AsicResistor] found the Totem to be a bit cramped, so naturally, it was time to design a keyboard from the ground up.

Image by [AsicResistor] via reddit
The case is wood, if that’s not immediately obvious. This fact is easily detectable in the lovely render, but I didn’t want to show you that here.

This travel-friendly keyboard has 34 keys and dual trackpoints, one on each half. If the nubbin isn’t your thing, there’s an optional, oversized trackball, which I would totally opt for. But I would need an 8-ball instead, simply because that’s my number.

A build video is coming at some point, so watch the GitHub, I suppose, or haunt r/ergomechkeyboards.

Flat as it may be, I would totally at least give this keyboard a fair chance. There’s just something about those keycaps, for starters. (Isn’t it always the keycaps with me?) For another, I dig the pinky stagger. I’m not sure that two on each side is nearly enough thumb keys for me, however.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pretty Protoypes” →

An Introduction To Analog Filtering

December 4, 2025 by 1 Comment

One of the major difficulties in studying electricity, especially when compared to many other physical phenomena, is that it cannot be observed directly by human senses. We can manipulate it to perform various tasks and see its effects indirectly, like the ionized channels formed during lightning strikes or the resistive heating of objects, but its underlying behavior is largely hidden from view. Even mathematical descriptions can quickly become complex and counter-intuitive, obscured behind layers of math and theory. Still, [lcamtuf] has made some strides in demystifying aspects of electricity in this introduction to analog filters.

The discussion on analog filters looks at a few straightforward examples first. Starting with an resistor-capacitor (RC) filter, [lcamtuf] explains it by breaking its behavior down into steps of how the circuit behaves over time. Starting with a DC source and no load, and then removing the resistor to show just the behavior of a capacitor, shows the basics of this circuit from various perspectives. From there it moves into how it behaves when exposed to a sine wave instead of a DC source, which is key to understanding its behavior in arbitrary analog environments such as those involved in audio applications.

There’s some math underlying all of these explanations, of course, but it’s not overwhelming like a third-year electrical engineering course might be. For anyone looking to get into signal processing or even just building a really nice set of speakers for their home theater, this is an excellent primer. We’ve seen some other demonstrations of filtering data as well, like this one which demonstrates basic filtering using a microcontroller.

Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look

December 4, 2025 by 1 Comment

The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.

Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally an igneous process, though, and so were presented in the article on magmatic ore processes.

For the most part, you can think of the various hydrothermal ore formation processes as being metamorphic in nature. That is, the fluids are causing alteration to existing rock formations; this is especially true of skarns.

There’s a third leg to that rock tripod, though: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Are there sedimentary rocks that happen to be ores? You betcha! In fact, one sedimentary process holds the most valuable ores on Earth– and as usual, it’s not likely to be restricted to this planet alone. Continue reading “Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look” →

UEFI On ARM? More Likely Than You Think

December 4, 2025 by 11 Comments

Now, Rock 5 ITX+ is no x86 board, sporting an ARM Rockship RK3588 on its ITX form-factor PCB, but reading this blog post’s headline might as well give you the impression. [Venn] from the [interfacinglinux.com] blog tells us about their journey bringing up UEFI on this board, thanks to the [EDK2-RK3588] project. Why? UEFI is genuinely nice for things like OS switching or system reconfiguration on the fly, and in many aspects, having a system management/configuration interface for your SBC sure beats the “flash microSD card and pray” traditional approach.

In theory, a UEFI binary runs like any other firmware. In theory. For [Venn], the journey wasn’t as smooth, which made it very well worth documenting. There’s maybe not a mountain, but at least a small hill of caveats: having to use a specific HDMI port to see the configuration output, somehow having to flash it onto SPI flash chip specifically (and managing to do that through Gnome file manager of all things), requiring a new enough kernel for GPU hardware acceleration… Yet, it works, it really does.

Worth it? From the looks of it, absolutely. One thing [Venn] points out is, the RK3588 is getting a lot of its features upstreamed, so it’s aiming to become a healthy chip for many a Linux goal. From the blog post comments, we’ve also learned that there’s a RPi UEFI port, even if for a specific CPU revision of the Model 5B, it’s still a nifty thing to know. Want to learn more about UEFI? You can start here or here, and if you want a fun hands-on example, you could very well start by running DOOM.

New Browser-based CAD System Is Best Friends With Triangle Meshes

December 4, 2025 by 21 Comments

Who’s interested in a brand new, from-scratch boundary representation (BREP) kernel? How about one that has no topological naming problem, a web-native parametric CAD front end to play with, and has CAD-type operations making friends with triangle meshes? If you’re intrigued, check out [mmiscool]’s BREP project.

Functioning (let alone feature-filled, or efficient) CAD systems are not a software project we see a whole lot of. Ones that represent models as genuine BREP structures but cleverly use mesh-based operations where it makes sense? Even less so.

In theory, CAD programs are simple: allow a user to define features, keep track of what they are and how they relate to one another, and perform operations on them as requested. In practice, it’s significant work. Chains of operations and dependencies easily become complex, volatile things and there is really no room for error.

Read [Arya Voronova]’s best practices for using FreeCAD to get a few hints as to what goes on behind the scenes in a modern CAD program, and the kinds of challenges the back end has to deal with, like the topological naming problem (TNP). A problem [mmiscool]’s implementation completely avoids, by the way.

There is a live demo at BREP.io which acts as a playground for the state of the project. You can get started by clicking the + button towards the top on the left panel to add features and operations to the history (like add a cube, then add chamfers or fillets, or extrude a face, and so on).

[mmiscool] points out that all computation is done client-side; even complex operations like fillets, lofts, and multi-body booleans execute directly in the browser with no need to be offloaded to a back end. BREP’s development is being documented on Hackaday.io and there is a video embedded below that gives an overview. Why don’t you give it a spin?

Continue reading “New Browser-based CAD System Is Best Friends With Triangle Meshes” →

A photo of tye blub glowing in the workshop

What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?

December 3, 2025 by 19 Comments

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it.

The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do such a thing? Well [Drake] said it was because he wanted to outdo [Photonicinduction] who had already put 20,000 watts through a light bulb. Nothing like a little friendly competition to drive… progress?

Continue reading “What Happens When You Pump 30,000 Watts Into A Tungsten Incandescent Light Bulb?” →